The Met’s display of 175 pictures, many capturing the joys and turbulence of postwar American life, is one of the New York museum’s largest-ever exhibits on a single photographer. An expanded version of the show debuted last year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

“Winogrand demanded of his pictures a kind of complexity and raw power that remains influential on picture-makers today,” said Jeff Rosenheim, curator in charge of the Met’s photography department. “The questions he asked about the role of the camera in our society remain relevant.”

Winogrand left roughly 6,500 rolls of film in disarray when he died in 1984 at age 56, six weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer. To prepare for the show in San Francisco, organizers printed nearly 100 of his pictures for the first time, exhibiting pieces that had never been seen before.

The retrospective, following Winogrand’s career from 1950 to his death, is the first major museum show about the photographer in a quarter of a century. It runs at the Met through Sept. 21.(Words by The Wall Street Journal)